


A Rose is a Rose is Eros

by archea2



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 15:10:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is the lone dark rose in John's garden. Magical realism.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Rose is a Rose is Eros

**Author's Note:**

> Written before/not compliant with S2. The children's book quoted by Harry is Saint Exupéry's _Little Prince_.

Long before they finish touring the house, Mike has fallen into a not-not routine. "Not London, of course, but you'll find you're not the only commuter, train schedules a bit shaky but a car wouldn’t be much use, not up to cottage standards but the drains won't be a problem", and more of the same. John, a staunch if slightly dispirited John, holds to his trademark line.

"It’s not as if I could afford...oh. You have a backgarden!"

His friend and landlord's smile broadens at the note of clear pleasure.

"Wouldn’t have pegged you as a greenthumber, John Watson. As I recall, you were more of a... birdwatcher in our younger days?" But his chuckle now addresses the crisp March air. John has limped onto a stretch of lawn, as evenly cropped as his own puddingbowl haircut. He takes in the clumps of flowers under the border hedge – begonias in the pink of health, yellow-eyed white primroses and baby tulips, with a sprinkle of forget-me-nots inbetween. All to the norm, altogether a decent, not-not English garden, neither gaudy nor subdued - the picture of its benevolent owner.

"And there’s the rose by the compost pile. Bit of a loner, that. Seems to have formed an exclusive attachment to dead plants, but if you could remember to water it now and then..."

John sweeps his gaze to the small compost heap at the end of the hedge. There is the rose indeed, so strange and unforeseen, an odd fellow with a girl's name and a stiff, thorny aloofness. John looks at the pale green stem flaring into a burst of petals, their purple a sharp foil to the candid pastels of the floral border. The rose is tall and still, but as John looks on, the March air all around them morphs into March wind, and the loner sways imperceptibly towards him.

"Won’t hob-nob with the bright young things," Mike’s hearty voice booms in his back. "But if you don’t mind keeping an eye on it..."

His words carry on in the cool evening air. John gazes at the dark lone rose.

\------------

"I’ve done my research, you know."

Carefully, one knee at a time, John lowers himself on the grass. It's been a long day and a longish ride home, lolling uncomfortably against the stiff headrest of his seat.

"According to that nice lady at Hudson’s Snax’n Sarnies, you’re a purple tiger rose. 'cept you're more purple than a rose has any call to be. More thorns, too, I bet."

John reaches a hand out to the proud stem only to whip it back, a red dot welling up on the ball of his thumb. The prickle is sharp-sweet. It feels like a warning and a tease and a wake-up call altogether. John's heart flinches alert.

"Whoa, Shere Khan. So that's what the Flower Power’s come to these days? Well. You go, mate. I’ve just spent eight hours speaking sugar and spice and all that’s nice to my fellow sufferers, a prickly rose makes an honest change. And the name is John."

\-----------

"Here, Sher, brought you some tea. You're the type that makes a sip go all the way to Tiperary, I know, but Mrs Hudson says black tea’s proteins to roses, so... Cheers. Don’t get high on it, you're enough of a tall poppy. Is that why you’re so haughty? 'Cause of the height? What’s it like, mate, having a bird’s-eye view of it all? That’s something I gave up on, you know. You'd think doctor rhymes with healer or fighter, and in the end you turn out a sodding plodder like the rest. Don’t mind the plodding, but – all right, sometimes I miss the view."

\------------

"What rhymes with plodder, Sher? You know, there are times when... Right. Say I’m sitting here on my flat-buttocked arse, and it’s like I'm seeing the sap fuse up in you, straight up to that head of yours. And the thing is, I... I feel like I see things better - after. Clearer. There was that young bloke today, light rash on both arms, standard allergy case history, and suddenly I saw..."

\------------

Once again, John has watered the kindergarten, as he calls it now. Then comes his favourite hour, when the sky curls around the six o'clock light. An hour for strolling back into the house and filling their mugs to the brim with Lapsang Souchong. John comes out again, sets their drinks on the grass – Sher's needs to cool a tad longer - and flips back on the ground, stretching himself in one loose, lazy motion.

He is telling Sher about another day in Helmand, when the clouds were lying  low on the white mineral plain, churning their unquiet smoke, and Private Ginslow’s pulse churning along, when a shadow falls across the rose.

"She was right, then." Harry’s voice, clotted with sarcasm and a tinge of glee. The glee tells John she's on the razor edge of withdrawal, making a bloody mess of introspection, and that anything will do to take the edge off - anything being usually a choice between John and Guinness.

"Old biddy at the station café. That’s why you never answer your phone, nice way to show appreciation for a gift, might as well get you a bloody pigeon. All you do is sit here, all the time, blabbing to a rose. So who's the one freaking out, tell me?" Harry’s laughter keels back and forth with her.

"Is it she who's your rose? D’you listen in when she complains, or boasts, or is simply silent? D’you feel responsible for her? Fuck, but I’m waxing jealous, Johnny-boy."

They are siblings, and as siblings they share this one trait, this mnemonic facility to recall whole sentences and paragraphs. Once it sealed a bond between them, when she made him recite his medical textbooks; now all it does is rouse his anger, because she is quoting from the one book Dad read to them in his sober mind, before they grew to fight their separate wars, John and Harry, and finally their mutual war.

"Shut up," he raps out, his mouth dryer than the lie of Helmand. "Let’s just – let’s go inside."

But there is no shutting up Harry. "What will you do next, John? Hop back to your desert and find yourself a nice Air Cop man? Ask him to draw you a sheep?" Her eyes graze his lambswool cardigan – the April nights are still this side of fresh - and out it comes again, the bloated, interminable laughter, leaving her red-eyed and exposed.

When John turns back from the garden gate, the mug has grown cold with waiting. John tugs his cardigan closer to his chest and lies down by the silent rose. "I’m sorry," he whispers, closing his eyes. Is he out of his mind? Private Ginslow confessed to his own left hand for two interminable hours before he died. "It is the time you have wasted on your rose," John recites tacitly, doggedly, « that makes your rose so important."

Something catches softly at the curve of his jaw, causing him to lift a hand. The petal is both heart-shaped and curl-shaped, and so purple that it looks almost black in John’s cupped palm. John smiles.

\-------------------------

He couldn’t have known. He is not a knowing person, never knew where to spot a blast in his Aghan days - when doctors were prescribed to wait until others took the brunt, before they ran in to assess the waste.

He couldn’t have known, because he leaves so early and unfocused that he never does more than perk an ear at the news. Because Sher is too tall to be kept under a tarp or a glass cloche. Because the crisp young voice on Radio 4 spoke of "strong rains" instead of half the Atlantic rising up against his train window, punching the glass from a near horizontal angle while he stares, helpless, willing each next station to act as a dyke to the flood, knowing that it will not...

At last he is stumbling into the garden, water everywhere, falling on the headless tulips, on the lawn, house, on him, falling furiously onto the compost heap as it eddies out into the mud and vanishes. John pushes the water out of his eyes and looks, looks, but the lawn cannot be told from the mud, and no vertical line meets his eyes.

He will ride out the storm out if it gives him back his rose, but there is nothing – no stem, no tiger, not one curl of soft dark flesh. The mud has sucked in Sher, and when John checks for damage under a bruised morning light, the waste is everywhere and the rose is gone.

\---------------------

He tells Mike that he has found a better-paid practice and moves to a bedroom flat in Bexley.

\----------------------

By the end of June, John is fully resigned to being out of his mind. Why he still grieves for the five inches of thorns and splendour he has known less than two months is beyond him, but he will mute the grief, not deny it. If he mentioned it, Ella would speak brightly of trauma displacement and bring in the talisman words, _free association_ , but John does not feel much like associating, freely or socially.

He turns off Harry’s phone after a while and either registers for early shifts or comes in late – the patient flow is lenient enough in summer. He cannot avoid a few communal breaks, but is generally left alone on the assumption that he is a bit of a bore, or a bear, or both. Mike e-mails to say the insurance people have dealt with the broken aerial and John can have the house for a week-end out if he likes. John doesn't reply.

\------------------------------

The first of August looks as if specially ordered for P. G. Woodehouse, a thing of blue skies and cavorting sunrays.

By five, John has seen his last patient out and is stretching out his arms at the window when his office door whips open, ushering in a tall young man with dark hair and, of all things, a blue _muffler_.

"I need a flu shot," the intruder proclaims with a regal wave of hand, which leaves him pitching slightly forward. John blinks. Then, taking in the hoarse voice and slim, probably underfed body, he grabs a chair and hurries to the center of the room.

Forty seconds later, he pulls off his sthetoscope and stares at his patient’s pallid face under its melee of curls. "A shot won't be any good, Mr —"

The young man produces another breezy stroke of hand."The name is Sherlock Holmes. It’s unimportant. What’s important is that I can’t wait for paracetamol to strike. The flu is giving me a sore head. The soreness is tampering with my customary neuronal voltage. When I’m dizzy, I cannot think as clearly as I’m used to. I cannot see, I cannot observe all the things. It is of the utmost importance that I observe them all, from every available angle. D'you see?"

The oratory explanation might be running on for a while if it wasn't interrupted by a hoarse cough. The young man’s head sways a little on his neck, though the rest of him continues taut and proud, unsupported by the back of the chair.

John doesn’t answer immediately. Holmes’ – _Sherlock’s_ – sentences are coming to him across a stretch of blurred air, like something he heard once, a tale read aloud, softly, unforgettably. "Not the flu," he says at last. "Incipient pneumonia, Mr Holmes. How did you manage to catch pneumonia in this weather?"

Sherlock stares back for a moment. Then, out of nowhere, comes a mischievous smile. 

"I have been under a waterfall."

John’s dizziness doesn't go. If anything it becomes deeper, headier, a rush of quiet euphoria. _Amazing_. "Not pneumonia," Sherlock is saying. "Chronic bronchitis, perhaps. I can still name all the signs."

"Can you?" John says urgently, not quite knowing what he’s asking, even as he reaches for his pad and begins to fill a prescription for antibiotics.

Sherlock’s Siamese eyes narrow a little, as if appraising this new turn of the tide, this odd undercurrent threading their talk, other than medical diagnosis. "Yes." As his gaze scours the poorly furnished cabinet, Sherlock rises from his chair and John, instinctively, follows suit.

"You've been in London for five or six months now," Sherlock begins slowly, "back from the Army, stationed abroad. You lived in a rural suburb until recently, but you chose to leave it because of something that happened there, a loss or an accident. Now you live in a much more cramped space, a recluse, and you don't like people, but you like Lapsang Souchong." Sherlock frowns and dips his head, tousling his dark curls with both hands. John’s own gaze flicks up from his solid unpolished country shoes to the non-medical books crowding his shelves and Harry’s phone on the desk, its inscription still legible under the dust.

"How do you know that I prefer Lapsang to people?" he asks slowly, not quite trusting his voice.

A beat, a silence. A puzzled young face.

"I don’t. That’s just it. I –" Sherlock shakes his head. "There’s always something. But usually, it’s something that I...miss."

The hoarse young voice is a blend of annoyance and wonder. John smiles.

"Well. As to that." And smiles, and smiles. He just can't help it, just as he can't help the quiver of happiness in his voice. "If you feel like... testing your hypothesis, one of these days, there’s a Starbucks down the street. Next to the chemist. For today, I’d advise the chemist and a quick ride home."

Sherlock pockets the prescription and heads for the door. He is three-quarters into the hall when he turns his head, peers at John intensely and mutters, "I always test my hypotheses."

And since this answer calls for no reply, it is only a matter of time before the two of them are stepping out of the empty building, straight into Highfield Gardens and its light-flooded streets.

FINIS


End file.
